Deciding to work with a recruiter to find employment for yourself can be difficult. Professional Alternatives is here to share how to successfully move forward with this process. The key is to find someone who is a fit to your career niche. The more they understand you, the more helpful a recruiter can be in landing your dream job. Our 5 recruiting teams focus in lending services, credit and risk, financial services, support services and professional services.

What Recruiters Should Be Asking You

They should ask you about who you are and what type of company culture you want to represent in the beginning of the process. To make the correct candidate/recruiter match is key to helping our recruiters really find the best fit for you at a career stand point.

Questions to Ask the Recruiter at Your First Meeting

• How long have you been recruiting?
• What is your recruiting niche?
• Who pays your fee? (It should be the hiring company)
• Can you share some of the employers that you work with?
• How many candidates have you place in jobs have you placed in the last year?

Recruiter Follow-Up after Moving Forward with Partnership

Make sure that your recruiter has all forms of contact information to reach you. Being readily available to your recruiter is crucial to this relationship. At any time a hiring employer could speak to your recruiter and need to know an answer about you for a potential job position. Depending on your time line of when you need a job, this will rely on how much your recruiter will need to be following up with you. Their job is to keep you in the loop at all times during this process. Our recruiters at Professional Alternatives main goal is to have a clear, honest and upfront relationship through this process.

Confirm Your Preparation Plan

Make sure to confirm your arrangement with your recruiter via email and phone call. Be upfront and honest from the beginning and give them any information that would be of importance. An example of what to reveal would be any companies that you would NOT work for. Along with companies that you would REALLY want to work for. Any past job issues, or accomplishments. They are not here to judge your career past, they are here to learn from it and place you in the best job role in the future.

Your Job Search Before Teaming with the Recruiting Firm

The recruiter you’re working with should ask you about your current job search and where you are at in it. Always let the recruiter know if you’ve received a job offer that you haven’t accepted yet, and also any jobs you have applied to before partnering with the recruiter’s agency.

When You Have Your First Interview

Partner with your recruiter and REASEARCH the company you’re interviewing with. Make sure that you have received all of the names and proper titles of who you are interviewing with at the company. Also, listen to your recruiter when they tell you how to prepare for the interview, and ask what questions may be asked by the interviewer to be fully prepared.

Confirm Compensation If/When Hired

Discuss in detail what the compensation for the hired position is. Confirm this agreement through email with your recruiter throughout the process. Then gather the assurance from your recruiter what benefits will be attained from the company.

If you were comfortable with the response and the interaction throughout this entire process, and you and the recruiter have developed a professional relationship. Then you have successfully picked the right recruiter and staffing firm to team with in your career journey!

Are you in need of a recruiter currently? Please reach out to our office at 713-572-2100 or email us at resumes@proalt.com. We would be honored to help you with your professional search!

Credit is an essential part of life that provides opportunity to build and achieve financial security for your future. This is a challenging task for young adults just starting out on their journey to build a good credit score. This can become a stressful responsibility because it weighs so heavily on their future purchases.

FICO Credit Score

This credit model is made up of 35% payment history, 30% accounts owned, 15% credit history, 10% new credit and 10% credit mix. FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corporation, which is a service used by the majority of lenders (banks) to help accurately predict a consumer’s ability to repay a debt on time.

Let’s go on to educate and explain what each of those percentages truly mean:

Payment History 35%

The lender giving the loaned out money wants to check to make sure that the borrower is going to pay them back. This is looking at your past bill payments, if they were paid on time or not and how long have you been making the payment in general. This search goes deep to where they even search if the borrower has ever been sent to a collection agency before, due to not paying their bills for a long period of time.

Accounts Owned 30%

This is focused on what amount of the credit that you have do you actually use? Having nothing spent on your credit card could actually hurt you, whereas if you have a reoccurring balance that you pay off can show that you are responsible and financially stable to pay off your credit bills.

Credit History 15%

The length of your credit history is also important. A long credit history is helpful (if it’s not marred by late payments and other negative items), but a short history can be fine too as long as you’ve made your payments on time and don’t owe too much.

New Credit 10%

Your score look at how many new lines of credit accounts you’ve opened up. It looks at how many new accounts you have applied for recently and when the last time you opened a new account was. Whenever you apply for a new line of credit, lenders typically do a hard inquiry which is the process of checking your credit information during the underwriting procedure. This is different from a soft inquiry retrieving your own credit information. Hard inquiries can cause a small and temporary decline in your credit score. This happens because the score assumes that, if you’ve opened several accounts recently and the percentage of these accounts is high compared to the total number, you could be a greater credit risk. People tend to do so when they are experiencing cash flow issues or planning to take on a lot of new debt.

Credit Mix 10%

The last percentage the FICO formula considers in defining your credit score is whether you have a mix of different types of credit, such as credit cards, store accounts, installment loans and mortgages. It also looks at how many total accounts you have. Since this is a small component of your score, don’t worry if you don’t have accounts in each of these categories, and don’t open new accounts just to increase your mix of credit types, like mentioned in the above paragraph.

To conclude, while your credit score is extremely important in getting approved for loans and getting the best interest rates, you don’t need to fixate over the scoring guidelines to have the kind of score that lenders want to see. In most cases, if you manage your credit responsibly, your score will show proof of that!

Oil prices have been dropping in Texas through the end of 2014 and into 2015, to an estimated amount of $83 million per day lost over six months in potential revenue for the state, according to a report by the Greater Houston Partnership. Just as Texas experienced economic growth during the oil boom, the falling oil prices and demand are expected to have wide-reaching effects for a projected two years and impact the Texas job market in a variety of ways:

Decline in Job Demand

Economist Karr Ingham, who analyzes economic indicators to develop the monthly Texas Petro Index, went on record in February 2015 and stated the Texas job market is likely to lose approximately 300,000 jobs both directly and indirectly related to the oil and gas industry. Fortunately, the industry accounts for around three percent of Texas’ nonagricultural job sector, so the impact won’t be disastrous state-wide; however, companies in the oil industry may have to reevaluate their employment strategies and consider layoffs or other budget cuts.

Reduced Profits

Dropping oil prices, as well as a lowered demand for oil-industry services, will presumably lead to an overall trend of dropped profits for oil related companies. For instance, Exxon Mobil Corporation, which is based out of Irving, Texas, reported 2014 fourth-quarter profit losses of 21 percent. With estimates of over a year before oil production slows enough to impact prices, businesses will need to think of ways to cut budgets in order to remain financially stable.

Uncertain Outlook

Since it is not known exactly how much more oil prices could potentially plummet, oil industry businesses face the unenviable task of attempting to plan without knowing much detail about what is in store for the near future. When planning for their employment needs, businesses may find contract workers or short-term temporary employees as more suitable options than strictly a full-time staff –  until they have a better idea of how their overall company will perform through the price dropping.

If dropping oil prices have impacted your Texas business, Professional Alternatives can be a trusted resource to keep your business on track while staying within budget. Since 1998, we have been serving Texas employers with their staffing needs. We offer temporary staffing, temp-to-hire, and direct hire placement so you can find the most qualified candidates while maintaining flexibility. Contact us today to learn more about our business services.